That time a customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

Microsoft Flight Simulator prided itself on its accuracy
and realism.
One of the things it has to get right are maps,
because knowing where you are is kind of important
when you're flying a plane.
(There are clubs whose members form a
virtual airline,
clocking hours flying virtual airplanes on virtual routes
around the globe.)

A call came in to product support to report that one of
the maps in the game was incorrect.
Specifically, the border between two European countries was
incorrectly placed.
This was a legitimate possibility, because this story
took place at a time when the map of Europe was
in a state of flux after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The product support engineer took notes on the error
for the Flight Simulator team to look at.
Microsoft has an internal department responsible for
maps and geography, and that team investigated the issue
and concluded that the map in the Flight Simulator game
was correct.

This conclusion was reported back to the customer,
but the story doesn't end there.
The customer was dissatisfied with the resolution of
the matter
and decided to do the obvious thing when this happens to you:
The customer sent email to Bill Gates.

Bill Gates actually reads his email,
and he forwarded the message to the head
of the Flight Simulator team with the note,
"Please look into this."

Now, if you're the head of the Flight Simulator
project,
you have plenty of things to deal with already,
and
one of the last things you want to get is a piece
of email from Bill Gates asking you to look into something.
(Related
story.)

The Flight Simulator team went back to the geographers
and asked them to re-check their information.
The geographers re-checked their maps,
looked at the internationally-recognized
border between the two countries,
searched for any information that would suggest
that there was an active border dispute between
the two countries,
but they couldn't find anything that would
indicate that the map included in Flight Simulator
was incorrect.

The product team called the customer back to get
some more information.
"As far as we can tell, the map in Flight Simulator
respects the current internationally-recognized border.
It is in agreement with
the XYZ Treaty and is consistent with United
Nations map number 31415.
Can you tell us what specifically is wrong with the map?"

The customer replied,
"Finally, somebody is going to do something about fixing
the map.
In Flight Simulator,
the border between the two countries goes from blah to
blah to blah,
but it's supposed to go from blah to blah to blah."

"Hm, that's not what our information says.
What map are you using?"

The customer answered,
"I'm using the world map on my shower curtain."

I don't know exactly what the product team said
in response to that.
I hope they said,
"You might want to upgrade your shower curtain."

Clearly, the recommended course of action should be for the customer to send a copy of the shower curtain map to the UN and the countries involved, get them all to agree on the new border, and then Microsoft would update the Flight Simulator map accordingly.

I wonder how realistic the operations of the virtual airlines are. In the game, do you get to have local police come on your plane and beat up your passengers and drag them off before you take off on your flight route?

This feels like it should be part of a trivia game show: “Troll or Urban Legend”.

I can’t fanthom someone bothering to email Bill Gates over a map on his shower curtain. (Plus I have a hard time imagining such a map being so precise to be able to pin-point a border between two landmarks.)

Apparently you haven’t met many simmers. Some of them are a little bit special. They’ll complain that people use an aircraft for a route the airline doesn’t actually use or that people are flying to an airport that doesn’t exist any more (Kai Tak is still a popular place to fly in to).

Hey, simmers can be useful too. A while back someone dug up an original DVD recording of the Wright Brothers that was apparently genuine, until a simmer pointed out that the flaperon shown in the DVD recording wasn’t invented until several years later, so the DVD obviously couldn’t be from 1904 but was from the 1920s at the earliest.

Also, considering how old MS Flight Simulator is, this may have happened in the late ’80s or early ’90s before email got really popular, and the user might have been a) newly-enamoured with the idea of email, b) pleased to have found that that billg even had a public email address, c) relatively short on other people to email, and d) bored, so why not give it a try – what did they have to lose?

I’m now wondering how the shower-curtain-map dates based on xkcd 1688![1]

Some people are just nuts. Almost twenty ago I worked for a company that had developed a custom VB6-esque language to program the hardware they sold. They marketed the language as an “object based programming language”. Once day, one of the support people approached me with a two page rant they had received from a customer who was incensed that we dared call that language a programming language when it was clearly a scripting language and demanded that we change all of our marketing and literature to fit his perception.

I remember reading someone’s anti-Microsoft rant many years ago. The crux of their argument seemed to be that, since you couldn’t just send complaints directly to bugs@microsoft.com, the whole company was doomed to obsolescence. I guess they didn’t realize they could just use billg@ instead.

My 8 year old, Grayson, has a map of the world as his bathroom shower curtain. His knowledge of world geography has increased tremendously and he’s challenged me on the capitals of South America and won.

Regarding emails to Bill: For a while in second half of the 1990’s, I used to get forwarded emails and physical letters send to Bill Gates that dealt with issues related to technology and disability (that was my area of responsibility at the company at the time). Some of the letters were downright heartbreaking, others were pleas to improve accessibility issues in our products – which we were working on already. So I can attest that Bill himself was reading those emails. Sometimes he would just ask me to reply on his behalf, or other times he’d ask questions about the topic – presumably to craft a reply himself.

I work for a company that makes addons for Flight Simulator X. (yes, the sim still lives on 11 years after its release!) All of us here had a big laugh tonight when this post got passed around the team. We’ve see this kind of stuff more frequently than we’d like to admit in our own support queue over the years. Thanks for the laughs!

I worked at a tech support shop a while back that did support for Flight Simulator. It was pretty surprising how often we got calls from real pilots, trying to explain to us techs on why a 747 doesn’t act correctly for whatever reason, or, things along those lines.